The Bride of Spooktober

Hey folks — it’s been a bit, but the run of the Kansas City Renaissance Festival ended this past weekend, and so now I’m rested up and ready to get back to my Spooktober viewing.

Last night was a first for Spooktober — I started a movie, and it was so bad that I shut it off and went for something else. The awful film was a demonic possession movie (usually of interest to this former Catholic School kid) called Along Came The Devil, and the less said about it, the better. I only made it like a half hour in.

Disappointed, I returned to an old favorite, which I haven’t watched in a couple of decades — 1986’s horror-comedy, VAMP, starring Grace Jones and 80s EveryNerd Chris Makepeace.

The movie features the first time that I recall seeing the “Vampires Run A Strip Club, Feeding On Men Who Won’t Be Missed” angle, later used in From Dusk Til Dawn. It also features a standard cringeworthy sidekick performance by Gedde Watanabe (although to be fair, this time it’s “clueless rich nerd”, rather than explicitly racist), and the “stripper with a heart of gold, who turns out to be the literal girl next door” stereotype played by Michelle Pfeiffer’s younger sister DeDee (over there —->), who wears the sort of outfits that 80s movies and music videos all told us that Hot Girls wore, but that were seldom encountered in the real world (I dunno, maybe this *was* how they dressed in L.A.?). Regardless, it’s a look that still speaks to my inner teenaged brain, I’m embarrassed to admit.

It’s not a good movie. At all. But I like it. It is steeped in nostalgia for me — of my vampire movie fandom, of my new wave music fandom, of my high school and early college years (I saw it in the theater when I was in high school, and rented it on VHS to watch in my dorm room with my roommate during my freshman year).

And sometimes, nostalgia is good enough.